3 South CMS Teletracking Champions on go live day. Pictured (left to right) are Raquel Santos, Norm Greenway and Narinder Dhesi.

Richmond CMS upgrade a great success

On April 26, the Capacity Management Suite (CMS) went live at Richmond Hospital. We’re very pleased to share the news that the upgrade was a success and staff’s transition to the new system has been relatively smooth.

Janice Mason from IMITS User Readiness provided “roaming” CMS support on the evening of April 27.

“When I did rounds, 4North got the prize,” she said. “Staff had the system up on their screen, were engaged, and were actively working with the CMS. They knew exactly where their CMS reference binder was and looked confident!”

CMS is key to refining patient flow

The CMS is not simply a tool for tracking patients through the system. The CMS supports the ability to facilitate the placement of patients in the right place, in the time, with the right amount of resources – at a far greater level than previously possible.

“This application also allows us to streamline and improve patient hand-overs, giving front line staff a level of patient information that will support the best care,” said Rich Dillon, manager, Patient Flow & Care Transitions. “The application’s strength in capturing data also redefines how we look at patient flow and access. The use of discharge milestones, for instance, will allow us to understand discharge barriers and then eliminate them. The opportunities for improvement are simply endless with CMS.”

We couldn’t have done it without you

The success of the upgrade is due in very large part to staff who contributed their time, efforts, and expertise to ensure the system was ready for implementation.

We’d like to extend a big THANK YOU to everyone who participated in solution validation and user acceptance testing sessions. We’d also like to recognize the Super Users who provided vital frontline support to their peers during the go-live as well as staff who completed online computer-based training in preparation for the change.

Next month, we’ll be working with the vendor (TeleTracking) to compare efficiencies before and after the CMS upgrade—but we already know that the system is having a positive impact. We look forward to sharing these findings with you in a future news story.

CMS technical support

If you require CMS technical support, please contact the VCH Service Desk via email at servicedesk@vch.ca or by phone at (604) 875-4334/ 1-888-875-4334.